Like everyone else in the MS-Marketing program, I took Marketing Research with Dr. David Curry. While I found some of the programming and probability formulas to be a little more than I had bargained for, one lesson I will always remember is how to craft survey questions.
"Mutually exclusive and exhaustive."
This week, Team Behr is composing questions for our market research survey, and that phrase, which describes how to structure a multiple-choice answer to a survey question, keeps ringing in my ears.
"Mutually exclusive" means that answers must not have any overlap. (The classic example is asking for age groups; responses of "18-20, 20-30, 30-40, 40 and up" will be confusing to anyone who is 20, 30, or 40.) "Exhaustive" means the responses must cover all possible answers. (To go back to the example of age, starting at age 18 is unwise if there's any chance someone under age 18 could be taking the survey.)
Designing a survey seems like such a simple matter, but there are tiny details like this that have to be considered. And then there's the fact that when you do a large online survey with hundreds of responses, you have to be able to analyze them efficiently, and you have to make it easy for the respondents to complete. That means that the essay questions you may be itching to ask your customers must be limited to "any additional comments?" at the end of the survey. A question like, "What is getting in the way of you performing your job at the highest level?" will get you a lot of great information when asked as part of a qualitative interview, but in an online survey, it needs to be a multiple-choice answer to be as effective as possible. Which means that the survey designers (us) have to come up with as many potential obstacles as possible and list them all. A challenge ... but a fun one.
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